Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 809

The True Cost of Beef Consumption

PRI
It's not even meat versus vegetables: “Basically, it is really beef versus everything else,” says Gideon Eshel, a research professor in environmental science and physics at Bard College who co-authored the study.
Eshel and his group set out to measure the costs of producing beef, poultry and eggs, and the results were staggering. Producing 1 mega-calorie of beef — or 1,000 calories — requires about 150 square meters of land. By comparison, eggs or poultry require about five square meters.And the numbers kept coming: The beef uses 1.6 cubic meters of water compared to about .1 cubic meters of water for eggs or poultry. Most shockingly, beef contributes to water pollution eight times more than eggs or poultry.
“A factor of eight is staggering,” Eshel says. “By comparison, a Prius is more efficient than a Hummer by barely a factor of two. A factor of eight is truly amazing.”

Freedom Road by Charles Bane, Jr.

Freedom Road by Charles Bane, Jr. | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Freedom Road is a long stretch, strewn with early hazards like the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But it has both a beginning and physical end. The beginning imprint of the first African forced ashore is lost, and we are now on a final section unmarked by light.
Reparations strike at the underlying  reality that corporate America has always had as a goal the destruction of communities across railroad tracks where steeples are thick as forests and from which the impulse to succeed at freedom poured. There would have been a Movement without Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., but none without faith.
Reparations is a new, independent economic construct; it looks on modern corporate dominance of the minority community as a driver to the fields, even on nights when the moon was full. It replaces this with funds for day care, health centers,  a stoppage of narcotics and guns. It is conditional on the release of non violent offenders, many to parents. And, above all, it is centered on banking, with assets capable of branching into lives, without red lines.. It uproots the influence of past corporate life which needed to be cleared from Black people's way.
Freedom High, Andrew Young called it, the exhilaration of lives  put at the hazard registering to vote, sit in at lunch counters, and travel in public buses through the South. But the Movement made evident more. It was a glimpse into the soul of a spiritual force that was superior to the majority's.
In the end, the history of the Black experience is parable and miracles and one of them – and the terminus of Freedom Road – stands on Treat Avenue in Savannah Georgia. First African Church's pews were made by slaves, and nailed to the floor, There are African markings in their wood. Its website describes the steeple once toppled by a hurricane. The "nine patch quilt " ceiling signaled to runaways that the church was a safe haven. Below stretched a tunnel for families continuing by the north star. Its entrance, to this day, remains unknown.
First African is an end point for the minority and the majority also, who must journey there to read on white pages, words in black.
***

Charles Bane, Jr. is the American author of The Chapbook   ( Curbside Splendor, 2011) and Love Poems ( Kelsay Books, 2014). His work was described by the Huffington Post as "not only standing on the shoulders of giants, but shrinking them."  Creator of The Meaning Of Poetry series for The Gutenberg Project, he is a current nominee as Poet Laureate of Florida.

Being a Young Black Man in America: 1 Year After the Zimmerman Verdict

1Hood Media

1Hood Media Academy Students speak about the climate in America for Black youth, one year after George Zimmerman was found not guilty for killing Trayvon Martin. Has anything changed?

Femi Kuti Recalls the Political Activism and Art of His Father Fela Kuti

Credit: Akintunde Akinleye /Reuters PRI | The Takeaway
The story of Fela Kuti's journey as a creative and ideological leader is the subject of director Alex Gibney's new documentary Finding Fela, which opens in select theaters across the country in August. Femi Kuti, the eldest son of Fela Kuti, was a member of his father's band, but he went on to develop a musical identity of his own that earned him four Grammy nominations. He's featured in Finding Fela and he reflected on his father's life.

"Give WE the Pride"-- featuring Chuck D & Mavis Staples [official video]

Photo: James Hank Harper, Jr. Public Enemy
"Give WE The Pride/Get It Right BE Gone" - Featuring Mavis Staples & Chuck D

Pick up the Mavis Staples & Chuck D extended MP3 single Bundle over at RapCentralStation.com http://bit.ly/1u7GmQq

Also, pick up the the FULL ALBUM HERE! http://bit.ly/1rTblOS

GRITtv: Black Women Respond to the Flaws of The President's 'My Brother's Keeper'

GRITtv | The Laura Flanders Show
My Brother's Keeper, while a noble campaign, overlooks girls and young women of color. In this video Kimberle Crenshaw law professor at UCLA and Columbia Universities as well as the Director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at the African American Policy Forum, along with Joanne Smith of Girls for Gender Equity, and Nakisha Lewis philanthropic strategist, lay out the realities on spending on young boys and men of color and #whywecantwait.

"There's no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist"-- Kara Walker on Becoming an Artist

Art21
In this episode of ART21 "Exclusive," Kara Walker reflects on her early success and offers advice to the next generation of artists. Walker received widespread attention after being included in a group exhibition at The Drawing Center in New York City in 1994, not long after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. Walker remained in Providence until she “felt ready” to make the move to New York. However, “When I came to the City,” she says, “I felt like my newly forming ego and sense of self was just torn to shreds.” 

"I Can't Breathe"--Broadway Protests the Death of Eric Garner and NYPD Use of Excessive Force

WalkRunFly Productions
BROADWAY STARS SEND A MESSAGE ABOUT POLICE VIOLENCE AND THE KILLING OF ERIC GARNER
On July 29th, at 6pm WalkRunFly Productions (Warren Adams & Brandon Victor Dixon) partnered with poet Daniel J. Watts, and over 100 Broadway stars, directors, producers, musicians, choreographers, designers and technicians in Times Square to send a message about violence and the killing of Eric Garner. 
CREDITS 

WalkRunFly Productions
www.wrfprod.com

Produced By
Warren Adams & Brandon Victor Dixon

Poem written and performed by
Daniel J. Watts
www.wattswords.com

Edited by
Darryl Harrison
Visual Architect

Videographers
Lowell Freedman, Antonio Thompson, Darryl Harrison, And Jesse Guma

Stereotypes, Testing and the 'Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations'

Stereotypes, Testing and the 'Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations' by William A. Darity, Alan A. Aja, & Darrick Hamilton | HuffPost
Earlier this month a divided Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the University of Texas' right to use race amongst its criteria for undergraduate admissions, however limited that right may be. While the decision will be viewed as a small victory for supporters of race-based affirmative action, there is little reason to believe that the widely held claim that black and Latino students enter selective universities as comparatively inferior students will not cease to rear its ugly head. It is a pervasive stereotype that minority students must face from matriculation to graduation, a stigma with undoubted adverse psychological and economic consequence that follows them well beyond higher education and into the labor market.
This claim, reasserted in a study published in 2012 in the Journal of Labor Economics by two Duke faculty members and a graduate student (Peter Arcidiacono, Esteban Aucejo, and Kenneth Spenner), anchors on a combination of black students' relative standardized-test scores and the authors' prior beliefs about the operation of affirmative action in admissions. It also should be noted that Arcidiacono has been a member of the research team for Project SEAPHE, a collective led by one of the chief architects of the war against affirmative action waged in California, UCLA Law School professor Richard Sander.
In their study, which was undertaken at the highly selective Duke University, the authors express concern about the pattern of students switching from majors in the natural sciences, engineering, and economics, which they view as more demanding majors, to majors in the humanities and social sciences, ostensibly less demanding majors. For black students, they argue, the tendency to switch from the "harder" majors to the "softer" majors is fully explained by the black students' weaker academic backgrounds. Thus the presence of black students with weaker academic backgrounds is attributable, in their view, to affirmative action in the admissions process.
It is true that at Duke University, black students' Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores are, on average, significantly lower than those of white students. For the cohort of students they examined, students entering Duke in 2001 and 2002, the mean SAT score for the math and verbal sections for white students was 1416, and for black students it was 1275. That constitutes a 130-point gap, although Duke's black students' scores were well above the national average for all students taking the SAT (about 1030), and substantially above the national average for black students taking the SAT (about 860). But much like the vast array of so-called "education reformers," the authors incorrectly assume that the SAT is a useful indicator of racial differences in preparation, and that sorting of black students by major is independent of stereotypical beliefs, which are based in part on SAT scores, held by the faculty themselves.
Students at Duke protested the study when it first received public attention, identifying it as not only misguided but offensive. However right their grievance may be, there is a much larger and more substantive danger than hurt feelings: The study was used in the anti-affirmative-action amicus brief brought before the Supreme Court for the 2013 Fisher v. University of Texas case. The plaintiff's complaint in Fisher charged that affirmative action leads to institutions of higher education lowering their admissions standards for targeted minorities.
We believe there are at least two ways to view affirmative action. One perspective, our view, is that it serves as a set of positive anti-discrimination measures designed to include persons in preferred positions of society from which they would otherwise have been excluded, despite their qualifications and merit.
An alternative view – the view that informs the authors' study – treats  affirmative action as a compensatory measure that de facto gives extra points to candidates who otherwise would not have met the admissions standards. From this perspective, affirmative action invariably leads to the admission or inclusion of less-qualified candidates. To the extent that faculty share the second view, they will be predisposed to believe that black students are inferior or less prepared than their non-black peers.
In comparison, we observe that there is no compelling research that supports the view that black employees in the wider workforce who get hired via affirmative action are inferior. Quite the contrary, comprehensive studies of affirmative action and hiring by researchers like Major Coleman and Harry Holzer and David Neumark find no significant difference in work performance between employees who entered jobs via affirmative action and those who entered via traditional hiring practices.
But what about black students and entry into selective universities? There is a major factor -- a factor conveniently missing from anti-affirmative-action legal briefs -- that can depress their test scores: stereotype threat. Stereotype threat constitutes the existence of widely held negative beliefs about the cognitive abilities of a particular group of people with real-life, everyday consequences. In the case of high-stakes, performance-based assessments, whether or not a person in the stigmatized group actually shares those beliefs, stereotype threat can adversely affect their test performance. Students consciously or subconsciously do not want to confirm the stereotype, thereby putting too much pressure on themselves while taking high-stakes tests; they then underperform relative to their full capabilities. A disheartening irony of stereotype threat is that the students from the stigmatized group that are most motivated to perform well on the test are the ones most susceptible to underperform on the test.
Experimental studies undertaken nearly 20 years ago by social psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson found that black students at Stanford University under the stereotype-threat condition had scores 13-percent lower than comparable black students in the no-threat condition. This is a nontrivial effect; a 13-percent reduction means that a student who might have scored 1200 under non-threat conditions would score only 1044 under threat conditions. Steele argues that stereotype threat is necessarily activated under high-stakes testing conditions like taking the SAT, a test that influences college admissions.
While at least some significant portion of the entry-test-score gap can be explained by stereotype threat, it can also operate pervasively after students enter college. Beliefs about black students' alleged inferiority create conditions where there is little reason for faculty members to try to "keep" black students in fields where, presumably, they don't really "belong." In fact, at the first sign of a poor grade, or even before, faculty members and course advisers may discourage black students from majoring in science or math fields. Indeed, information about the racial test-score gap at their respective institution may reinforce faculty members' expectation that black students are not as academically competent as their non-black peers.
But the depressant effect of stereotype threat can disguise or hide black students' academic competency. A team of researchers at the University of Waterloo and Stanford University, led by Christine Logel and Gregory Walton, demonstrated in a paper that appeared inEducational Psychology in 2012 that when black students have the opportunity to be in a stereotype-safe environment, they outperform white students with comparable test scores upon admission. That's correct: Black students outperformed white students! Indeed, Walton, Steven Spencer, and Sam Erman have made the case that because test scores underestimate black students' academic potential, affirmative action actually performs the task of including stronger students in selective institutions of higher education; thus they aptly describe affirmative action as "affirmative meritocracy."
Applying this to the case of Duke University, black students' "latent ability" also is suppressed by the impact of stereotype threat on their educational experiences both prior to and after entry to the university. The assumption that, relative to non-black Duke students, they are academically deficient is incorrect; the problem is that Duke, and most other selective universities, is deficient in providing them with a stereotype-safe environment. Thus the use of a study that ignores this reality in any judicial case involving affirmative action -- despite this month's small (and probably temporary) victory for "affirmative meritocracy," is at least brazenly irresponsible.
Unfortunately, there is still more to consider. A remarkable study by economists Talia Bar and Asaf Zussman on the phenomenon of "partisan grading" finds that faculty in the natural sciences tend to assign lower grades to black and Latino students even after accounting for their actual SAT scores -- scores already depressed in part due to stereotype threat. Thus, momentum builds to push black and Latino students out of the natural sciences, a momentum linked to faculty beliefs that affirmative action has brought an inferior student -- a black student -- into their classroom. Discouraged from science and math, black students often shift to the humanities or social sciences other than economics. Given the circumstances, this is not an unwise decision. Bar and Zussman find that, generally, black and Latino students in these majors are graded with more equanimity.
But the circumstances should not be a given. If the absence of black and Latino scholars in science, technology, engineering, math and economics is genuinely a matter for concern, it would seem that universities would place a special interest in nurturing students from underrepresented groups in these fields to complete the major and to pursue doctoral work. Rather than promoting a self-fulfilling prophecy of anticipated failure by black and Latino students, faculty in these fields, together with college administrative support staff, need to learn how to minimize stereotype threat and promote black and Latino students' success.
***
Alan A. Aja is an Assistant Professor and Deputy Chair in the Department of Puerto Rican & Latin@ Studies at Brooklyn College (City University of New York).
Darrick Hamilton is an associate professor of economics and urban policy at The New School, an affiliate scholar at the Center for American Progress, and a research affiliate at the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke University.
William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies and Economics; and Director, Duke Consortium on Social Equality.  

USA Swimming Unveils #SwimToday Campaign to Encourage Participation in Competitive Swimming

USA Swimming , the national governing body of competitive swimming in the United States, unveils SwimToday campaign to encourage youth and their parents to look at competitive swimming as a regular sports activity.